


After Vicious Cycles

by rlucine



Series: The Space Between [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Abusive Parents, Character Study, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Loneliness, Parent Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slice of Life, Suicidal Thoughts, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-04-18 03:07:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21776008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rlucine/pseuds/rlucine
Summary: After the war breaks, Bernadetta returns to her father's estate and relapses into self-isolation. When her father's health fails, Bernadetta remembers her promise to reunite with her friends at the monastery.
Relationships: Bernadetta von Varley & Bernadetta von Varley's Father, Dorothea Arnault/Bernadetta von Varley
Series: The Space Between [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1615993
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	After Vicious Cycles

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Bernadetta's personal history if you recruit her on Azure Moon. In 1181 she returns to Varley territory, and in 1185 she journeys back to the monastery alone to keep her promise. These are her two biggest fears.
> 
> Title references [Vicious Cycles](https://filthyxliars.bandcamp.com/track/vicious-cycles) by the Filthy Liars. (The entire song could be the title of this piece.)

### I

The monastery is abandoned, the earth below it gouged into a twisted smile haunted with dust. Bernadetta isn't particularly spiritual, and she doesn't believe in ghosts the same way that Lysithea did, but she believes in death and the space it leaves behind.

Bernadetta is the first to leave the convoy from Garreg Mach to Enbarr. The Black Eagles leave her in Varley territory and continue down the cobblestone road; the last she sees of Dorothea is a downcast glance from the back of her wagon before she turns away.

It's unbelievable. Edelgard is the emperor. And now none of them are students, and Bernadetta is back at the same house with the same father, with only the weight of everything she's left unsaid.

Bernadetta knocks on the door of her father's mansion, prim and proper like she was told to be, and when he opens the door, Bernadetta says "Hello, Father" and curtsies like nothing was different at all.

### II

The Varley manor stands monolithic and weathered, its formerly clean facade spotted covered in lichen and ivy. The windows are designed to function as arrowslits should the need arise, but they've always struck Bernadetta as akin to apertures in a cell, or fortifications unique to war: more than a family's house should have. But then again, her family was nobility, and the Varley who built the house in peacetime had correctly anticipated another war.

The great hall is a broad expanse of plaster and wood, with a ceiling too high to dust and tapestries too frail to clean behind. Daylight projects the shape of chandeliers across the high walls; Bernadetta always feels small here, even without her fathers' presence. Now, Bernadetta stands on the rug and looks at the succession of her forefathers' paintings along the wall. She wonders how much has been hidden by an artist's brush; where along the line the Varleys forgot to love each other.

A list of paintings:

  * Bernadetta is fifteen, smiling, her eyes bright and her back straight. When she was being painted, her father had turned to the artist and said, "I don't suppose you'll be able to draw her as she ought to be," and so her sickly pallor, dark eyes, and slouch were painted away. Bernadetta remembers fixating on the crocheted doily covering the table before her, unable to look anywhere else.

Later, when the painting was complete and displayed, Bernadetta's father would set one of the kitchen chairs before it and tie her there, facing the painting like a reflection.

  * Bernadetta's father sits stern at the side table in his study, his eyes and brow mountainous by candlelight. He is younger, his hair still a fair brown, his skin not yet pockmarked and sallow. It is hard for Bernadetta to imagine her father as anything but a grown man, but the truth is that he was a child before, too.

Bernadetta's father once told her that he would beat sense into her like his father did to him. Bernadetta is weak, so she allows him the excuse.

  * Bernadetta's mother sits like a leaf in the wind, blown into the painting by mistake.

  * Bernadetta's uncle is a broad, unmovable man with a quaint, tentative smile and a shine in his eye. He really does look like Professor Alois, although he also looks like Bernadetta's father, which should have been obvious but startles her anyway.

  * Bernadetta's grandfather sits with a cane in one hand. She remembers how he bent over the cane like a rock, heavy and precarious, when he would grab her hair a bit too roughly. She was five, and her lack of nobility was still her father's fault.

Now, Bernadetta's grandparents are buried in the field past the stables. Her father dug the graves himself, while a crowd of nobility in their finest black looked over the stable fence and whispered. Bernadetta stood with her mother's hands cold on her shoulders, while her father sweated and dug. He was doing men's work. A woman's job was to be grateful.

Bernadetta's father uses her grandfather's cane, now. He is only under house arrest, but he walks with a limp and a frailty that he didn't have a year ago, and Bernadetta wonders if he could still force her to do anything, or if he'd already given up.

### III

Bernadetta wonders if she is still supposed to love her father.

Bernadetta has not left the house in the six moons since the fall of Garreg Mach, and she is reading in the stone nook of a window in her room when her father receives a message that Bernadetta's mother is dead.

Bernadetta's father does not cry. He cannot leave the mansion — the Empire soldiers guarding the doors make sure of that — but even if he could, the ground is too frosted and his body too weak to bury her himself. Bernadetta overhears him dispatch burial orders to the servants and shuffle back to his study.

The Empire certainly did something to her father, Bernadetta has concluded. If Hubert didn't order her father's assassination, he must have had him tied to a chair and tormented in the same ways he thought Bernadetta was. It was probably supposed to be fair, but Bernadetta doesn't know if fairness is something she should want if it begets violence. Violence is the opposite of love.

Bernadetta only sort of cries when she overhears that her mother is dead. She thinks about Byleth a lot, and they're probably the wrong person to be crying about when she's just learned that her mother is dead. Her mother might have been estranged, but she was her own person, too. She was the reason Bernadetta met Byleth, even if the reason was a kidnapping in the middle of the night. Maybe Bernadetta was supposed to be grateful for that.

The kidnappers had broken down Bernadetta's bedroom door and shoved a bag over her head and that was the last she'd seen of her childhood room until the war broke and she drifted back in. The wood around the lock was still splintered, so Bernadetta had to borrow some tools from one of her uncles' old workshops in the men's wing of the manor. When she was locked in, Bernadetta could keep all the books in the library, have meals delivered to her door by the kitchen servants, even sing quietly, if she knew nobody could hear.

This is what she wanted, right? To become a ghost and disappear? To seem like the only person who lived in the house?

Instead, Bernadetta misses her family, and cries over nothing.

### IV

It is one year since the fall of Garreg Mach, and Bernadetta hasn't spoken to her father since their first meeting at the doorstep. She'd said "Hello, Father," with the intent to say "Goodbye, Father" when she left. She wasn't sure when that was going to be.

Dorothea knew how to live. Bernadetta sometimes wished she was also an orphan because then she would have put together some sort of meaningful, self-sufficient life by necessity. Instead, Bernadetta stayed alive because of her father's fortune, and she wasn't even really grateful for that. She was supposed to be.

Bernadetta wants to ask Dorothea: "Is having any father always better than none?" Not to test Dorothea's philosophical limitations, but because Bernadetta genuinely doesn't know.

Bernadetta reads a lot of books, and so she's read a lot about fathers. In one, a knight spends years searching for the grave of his father, who died in war while the knight was an infant. Bernadetta thinks it's ridiculous for the knight to spend his life looking for a dead man he never even met. The knight's father could have grown into the same man as Bernadetta's father were he alive; maybe the knight's father was also a drunk who came home to beat his wife and the world was better rid of him, too.

Bernadetta thinks about going across the mansion to sit down with her father and ask him: What made him fall in love with Bernadetta's mother? Was he ever in love at all? Was he sorry for what he did to her?

Bernadetta also wants to ask Byleth if she should forgive her father. Byleth would probably tell Bernadetta that forgiveness is something she has to decide for herself, but Bernadetta still wants their comfort. Bernadetta hasn't forgotten the promise she made, even though it was so impromptu that the others had probably forgotten.

_Class reunion in five years,_ Byleth had signed. _Promise?_

"For sure," Dorothea had said. "Bern?"

Bernadetta had nodded, and followed Dorothea to the dining hall. They had probably talked about something normal, like dances or the Goddess Tower or how grateful Bernadetta was to be away from home. It's impossibly distant now, like the pages of Bernadetta's memory are yellowing and flaking apart, the truth of her life disintegrating into another fiction.

### V

Bernadetta is twenty and hasn't left the house in two years. It's not a waste, Bernadetta tells herself, because she's been able to think about so many different things. The Byleth and Dorothea that live in Bernadetta's head are just as real as the actual people, and so when Bernadetta sits down on her bed and imagines the three of them sharing a meal at the dining hall, it is home.

Bernadetta's father has cancer. The doctors came to amputate his leg in a loud, screaming affair while Bernadetta plugged her ears with her fingers and read.

A servant stops by Bernadetta's room sometime later to deliver her father's will. The document is sealed with wax, and Bernadetta throws it into her desk drawer without reading it. Her response is disturbingly apathetic, even to herself, and she wonders if someone should chastise her for being unloving.

Dorothea has never chastised Bernadetta before. She offered to beat up Bernadetta's father, but now that seems cruel and pointless, even though Bernadetta's father is dying and Bernadetta doesn't care.

Dorothea was probably just a fluke. She's the type to love openly and frequently, and so circumstance brought her and Bernadetta together just as easily as it split them apart. It probably didn't mean a whole lot in the scope of the world. People kiss. Bernadetta's parents used to but that didn't make their love mean anything, if it existed at all. Bernadetta's parents were just human. They made mistakes and had regrets and died or will die just like any other human.

Bernadetta wonders if she's actually capable of loving anyone. She'd certainly thought so, in a moment of weakness after the ball with Dorothea, and Bernadetta certainly missed Byleth too, but the truth is that Bernadetta has been alone for two years and it's her fault. She wasn't ordered to stay at the Varley estate — she could have moved to Enbarr, set up a life for herself, gone outside. All it would have taken was a single question sometime during the week she was in the convoy away from Garreg Mach, but Bernadetta was weak then and she's still weak now.

### VI

Bernadetta is twenty-one and an orphan. She inherits the manor, the fortune, and the rights to the estate and the law in Varley territory and the first thing she does is hire a gravedigger to bury the body.

The burial is probably something that other nobles should have attended, but Bernadetta doesn't bother going through her father's registry. She puts on a black dress and a veil and stands awkwardly by the stable gates while a man she's never met plunges a spade into the frozen ground. She thinks about men's work, then, and how there wasn't a man left in the house and how she'd hired someone to dig instead of digging herself.

Bernadetta's fingers and toes are numb by the time the gravedigger finishes. She watches as the man carts her father's rigid body out of the manor and dumps it into the hole like a sack of potatoes. The body is wrapped in burlap, expecting placement in a coffin, but Bernadetta had had no desire to find a carpenter. She stands over the grave, looking at the part of the burlap that her father's face is probably behind, and whispers under her breath, "Goodbye, Father."

### VII

The night after the burial, Bernadetta sits on a chair in the great hall and looks at the images of herself and her father. The paint and frames are the same as they've ever been, the details brushed into Bernadetta's mind from hours of punishment, and Bernadetta smiles, because it all seems so quaint now. It feels like when Bernadetta finishes a book and the whole story falls back into perspective.

It's just fiction, then. It's just over.

### VIII

Bernadetta is twenty-two when she leaves the Varley Manor.

It's probably blind faith to think that her promise five years ago meant anything, but it's not like she has anything left to cling to. Bernadetta leaves the estate to the servants to deal with. It's not like she's coming back.

Garreg Mach monastery is three days by horse from Varley land, if the roads are as clear as they were on the convoy four years ago. That makes about one or two weeks walking, depending on the conditions. All accounts of travel, as well as Bernadetta's prior experience, advise a route through the Leicester Alliance by the Great Bridge of Myrddin, but the borders are not so simple in wartime.

A traveller's journal in the Varley library calls a crossing through the Oghma Mountains 'suicidal', and Bernadetta agrees. She leaves the manor with her father's fur coat, lined gloves, boots, the longbow she last used in the battle at Garreg Mach, and a quiver of broadhead arrows strapped to her hip.

A list of days:

  1. Bernadetta sleeps on the side of the road for the first time. She presses her ungloved hand into the frozen dirt and wonders why it took her a whole year after her father's death before she left the manor. As if the whole past four years were anything but wasted.

  2. Bernadetta sleeps on the side of the road for the second time. There's an inn in the distance, but people know what Count Varley's daughter looked like. Bernadetta won't pretend that she even tried to manage the territory; the paperwork piled up outside her bedroom door and remained untouched. It's probably proof of Edelgard's destruction of the nobility that no minor lord revolted and claimed Bernadetta's head.

  3. The Oghma Mountains are finally visible across the frozen plains, and Bernadetta settles down for an hour to sketch the view. She realizes halfway through that she wants to show the sketch to Dorothea.

  4. As Bernadetta walks, she tends to fall away from reality into her thoughts. Like, what if the promise didn't mean anything to Dorothea, and she's content to sing and find love on her own in Enbarr? If Bernadetta was going to pick a direction to walk in and walk that way forever, why didn't she walk towards Enbarr?

  5. Bernadetta has a nightmare. She chases Dorothea across the ruins of the monastery into the Goddess Tower and finds nothing but the body of her father, wrapped in burlap and festering with maggots. The painting of fifteen-year old Bernadetta hangs on the wall above, the color flaking off in ruin, and Bernadetta screams and screams again, choking on the weight of everything that happened.

  6. Byleth once told Bernadetta that wolverines can climb trees, so Bernadetta sleeps in caves and between rocks for protection. It's probably superstition or guesswork, but what part of her pilgrimage isn't?

  7. Bernadetta thinks about Byleth a lot. She hasn't practiced sign language in four years but she tries to summon words out through muscle memory and finger-spells the rest. Byleth used to run seminars on their free days so they could communicate with students without using a handheld chalkboard. Bernadetta signs 'hello', 'how are you', 'I missed you'.

  8. It's only been a week of travel, but it feels like a year. Bernadetta is used to going months without noticing her body, but now she has to do it every day. For example: she's cold. She's hungry. She bruised her leg stumbling over a loose boulder and should probably jostle every rock on the mountainside with a stick before she climbs over them.

  9. Bernadetta wonders if it's really bravery to wander into the mountains to kill yourself, only to give up on death and survive an impossible journey by default.

  10. Across the snowy peaks of mountains, Bernadetta sees the ruins of Garreg Mach. She stops, takes her hand out of her glove to sketch the view even though the air bites her bare skin. She breathes in and out, lets every cloud of breath become a reminder that she's still alive.

  11. Byleth would probably tell Bernadetta to forgive herself for everything; that time spent surviving is never wasted. Bernadetta can't go back and fix things, can't redo four years of her life, but she can keep going forward. One step at a time. One day at a time.

  12. The truth is that Dorothea probably missed Bernadetta just as much as Bernadetta missed Dorothea. It was just hard to think about, and easy to decide it didn't actually matter. But it mattered, a lot, and Bernadetta is slowly allowing herself to cherish her.

When Bernadetta reaches the monastery gate, she's drenched in sweat under her coat, with frost clinging to her scarf and eyelashes, blood from every animal she's killed and eaten crusted on her gloves. It's a leap of faith, she realizes. So she takes it, and doesn't look back.

**Author's Note:**

> So this started as an erotica, but then I wanted to make it more of a slow burn, and then I ended up writing 3000 words about Bernadetta's dead dad before I started thinking critically about what the fuck was going on. Anyway I'm posting this and I'll probably keep trying to write erotica now that all my Dad Emotions are (hopefully) out of the way. It won't be another chapter of this work, though. It'll be a different work.


End file.
